As class began at Santa Fe: 'There's a shooting at school'

As class began at Santa Fe: 'There's a shooting at school'

SANTA FE — Travis Stanich smoked a Marlboro behind his house in the predawn darkness Friday as his stepson slipped out the back door.

“I’ve just got to get through one more day,” Jared Black said to Stanich, looking forward to his birthday party on Saturday.

Jared, quiet and kind, turned 17 on Wednesday. The Staniches bought a new above-ground pool and filled it up in preparation for the party.

Stanich watched Jared leave, heading down the old farm road toward the bus stop, bound for Santa Fe High School.

Art was his first-period class.

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Rome Shubert arrived a few minutes early to art class, on the ground floor of the long, boxy high school building. He was the starting pitcher on the varsity baseball team, and he was still upset over the team’s loss the night before. The 16-year-old sophomore had pitched six near-perfect innings — something to be proud of — but his team never scored.

He’d have another chance to win that night. He wore his lucky away-game shirt, with “Santa Fe Indians Baseball” on the front. The school of 1,500 students was a week past prom, two weeks from graduation and the social center of this former railroad town, population 13,000, southeast of Houston.

Class started. The door to the room was open, as usual. It often got hot. The art classroom was connected to a second room by a shared supply closet.

Shubert first heard a high-pitched sound. Maybe someone dropped their keys. He didn’t turn around to look for what was causing it. A bang followed, one of the loudest things he’d ever heard. What was that?

His ears rang. A gunman had entered his classroom, Shubert thought.

As the shots continued, he dropped under his desk, flipped it forward and peeked around it. He saw the gunman’s legs. He saw a kid lying on the ground.

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Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, faces capital murder charges for allegedly going on a rampage at Santa Fe high school Friday morning, that left 10 people dead and another 10 injured.

Media: Staff, Houston Chronicle

Courtney Marshall, 15, sat at a desk near the door of the adjoining art room when the shotgun fired in the hallway. She knew the sound, and knew what it meant.

Marshall bolted for the classroom’s back door, a crowd of screaming students with her. Behind them, the blasts kept coming. She didn’t turn around to see where the shooter was.

But as she ran, she saw one friend fall, hit in the head with a round.

Then another friend stumbled, shot in his side.

The classroom’s back door was locked. A boy threw a chair at it. It bounced off. The students turned, sprinting for the supply closet that connected the two art rooms, Marshall’s and Shubert’s.

Student after student bolted through the walk-through closet, into the other classroom, away from the shooter. Marshall stopped. Her teacher had fallen in a corner. She helped her up, she said, and the two ran into the closet, the last to make it in.

Only then did Marshall turn, looking back at the classroom.

Bodies and blood littered the floor. She thought it looked like a murder scene in a movie.

The gunman was there, in her classroom, less than 20 feet away.

Her blue eyes met his.

His shotgun was pointed straight at her.

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The first 9-1-1 calls came in at 7:32 a.m.

Galveston County Precinct 2 Constable Jimmy Fullen, 54, was driving to the hospital to spend the day with his dad when he heard the alert across the police radio. There is an active shooter at Santa Fe High School.

A deputy from his office flew by him, siren and lights on. Fullen called him to ask if he had understood the radio correctly.

Fullen swung a U-turn. He raced to the school, listening as the radio traffic increased. The shooter was in the arts hallway. An officer was down.

The constable pulled up to the school and rushed into the building from the front with the first group of responders.

There was no time for a formal plan; they moved together toward the art rooms in the back of the school.

Fullen saw the injured officer, John Barnes, a Houston Police veteran who had spent four months working for the school district after his retirement, being pulled down the hallway where the art rooms are located. He had been shot once by a bullet that passed through his right elbow and arteries, prompting a spray of blood.

He saw another team that entered from the back exchange gunfire with the shooter, who was in a classroom Fullen could not see.

Fullen was afraid Barnes was going to die there and so, with the help of others, carried him out to the paramedics. On the way out, they twice tried to apply a tourniquet. The blood stopped after their third try.

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Off that same hallway, inside one of the art rooms, a student slammed the closet door shut and held it, separating the gunman from Marshall for a moment.

Marshall wanted him to let go, to run through the closet, into the adjoining room, and away. She whispered into her classmate’s ear. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.

On the other side of the door, she heard the gunman cock his shotgun. Or reload, maybe.

Then the gun roared, blasting through the closet door. The student between her and the shooter, holding the door shut, fell down. The door swung open.

Marshall turned and ran, through the closet and toward the other room.

As she ran, a blast hit her teacher, who was behind her in the closet. Another shot struck cans of paint on the closet shelves right next to her, exploding the cans and splattering gold-glittered acrylic all over the back of her long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans.

Marshall kept running. Just outside of the closet, now in the adjacent room, she jumped over a body. She turned and headed for the hallway. Her classmates were about 50 feet ahead, running toward the high school stadium.

Behind her, she kept hearing shots.

She sprinted for the field, her cowboy boots tracking blood.

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Shubert, the baseball player, fled from an art room door that led directly outside, into a walled-off space the students could use. The wall was at least as tall as he was, but Shubert heaved his 6-foot-frame over it, and ran into the parking lot.

He saw a friend lying on the ground behind a car and stopped to check on him.

Shubert looked down, confused.

His lucky shirt was covered in blood.

A bullet had entered the back of Shubert’s head, near the top vertebrae, and exited beneath his left ear.

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Cars still sit in the parking lot where they were left as the sun sets on Santa Fe High School, scene of a fatal shooting that left at least 10 dead, Saturday, May 19, 2018, in Santa Fe, TX. (Mark Mulligan | Houston Chronicle)

At 7:41 a.m., Maria Arriaga’s cellphone rang as she was getting her second-grader ready for field day at her elementary school.

“There’s a shooting at school,” said her son, Adrian, a 17-year-old junior.

He sounded calm.

“I’m outside,” he said, and walking toward a metal building. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was headed.

They’d been through something like this before, in February. Someone thought they’d heard gunshots at school and it turned out to be nothing. She logged onto Facebook, thinking if something was going on, it would be on the Santa Fe Chat page. Sure enough, someone had posted that police vehicles were headed down Highway 6 toward the high school.

“Son just called,” Arriaga wrote quickly. “Shots heard.”

Adrian texted his mom again: There’s a perimeter, he warned. You can’t get close.

She went anyway, hoping to be nearby as soon as he was allowed to leave.

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Shubert’s mom picked up the phone at 7:47 a.m. Her son’s girlfriend, 16-year-old Maddy Blake, was on the other end.

“Ms. Sheri,” Blake said, “there’s been a shooting at the school, and I can’t find Rome.”

Other moms started texting. They had found their sons.

Sheri Shubert, 48, got in her car. She drove as close as she could to the school.

Blake called again. Another girl had seen Shubert get into an ambulance.

Not my kid, the mother thought. Not us.

Pamela Stanich, center, tries in vain to call her son Jared Black, a Santa Fe High School junior, on Friday outside the Alamo Gym, where parents and students wait to be reunited after a mass shooting at the school.

(Michael Ciaglo | Houston Chronicle)

Shubert wasn’t responding to his girlfriend’s texts. His baseball photo was tucked in the back of her polka-dot phone case. She wore his name on a necklace.

At 7:55 a.m., she wrote to him: “Text me back please”

She waited. She texted him again: “I love you.”

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Students poured out of the high school and ran down Highway 6. They filled the parking lots of the Chevron and Shell gas stations and The Santa Fe Car Wash. They clumped in groups. They sat on the ground, crying. Police cars sped by, lights on, sirens screaming.

Inside the school, a DPS trooper fired off a shot. Many details of that moment remain clouded. DPS has provided few details or identified the trooper or described how that moment unfolded.

What is known: At 8:02 a.m., the gunman, outfitted in a trench coat and combat boots, walked out of the art classroom and surrendered.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis Jr., a 17-year-old student at the school, was taken to the Santa Fe Police Department. Pagourtzis waived his Miranda rights, according to court records, and told investigators he didn’t shoot students he liked, “so he could have his story told.”

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Stanich, the stepfather of Jared Black, was sitting on the toilet at 8:15 a.m., scrolling through Facebook, when he saw Arriaga’s post about shots fired at the school.

He called his wife, Pamela, 43, from his phone. She sat in the living room.

He heard the front door slam before he even got out of the bathroom.

Stanich flipped on the news, but nobody was covering the high school then. He opened a police scanner app on his phone. They were talking about pipe bombs and the bomb squad at the school, he said.

Stanich woke up his younger stepson, Houston, 13. They sat down in front of the television. News trucks began to arrive at the high school. Stanich and Houston stared at the footage, straining to catch a glimpse of Jared.

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Arriaga’s son, Adrian, ran with the crowd as the school emptied out. He hid behind the Indian Automotive shop, directly across the highway from the school. Authorities sent him to the Chevron on the corner of Tower Road and Highway 6, where his mother found him.

She hugged him, and loaded him into the Suburban around 8:30 a.m.

“Are you OK?” she asked Adrian.

He said yes.

The kids were saying the shooter was dressed in a trench coat and black combat boots.

Adrian told his mom Pagourtzis wore that all the time. They had second period together, he said. It was a forensic sciences class.

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Neither Stanich nor his wife had heard from Jared. She drove to the Shell station; he wasn’t there. And to the old gym; he wasn’t there either. She picked up some of Jared’s friends off the street. The district directed her to another of its buildings, the Alamo Gym, across from the HEB off Highway 6.

There, other parents with missing kids waited, too.

Students gather near Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas on May 18, 2018. Officials confirmed shots were fired on the campus. (Godofredo A. Vasquez | Houston Chronicle)

Stanich, a welder and maintenance manager for a crane rental facility in Texas City, got into his gray Ford pickup, dusty and muddy from the crane lot, and headed to meet her.

He found his wife immediately. She stood up straight at first, holding her emotions together. Then she started to sob.

In the hospital room, Shubert asked to borrow the nurse’s phone. His iPhone X had fallen from his pocket when he fled the art room. He called his mom.

She was crying. An ICU nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, she knew what trauma could look like.

Shubert could walk. He could talk. If the bullet had entered his head slightly differently, the baseball star could have been killed or paralyzed.

The doctor told him how lucky he was.

Shubert walked out of his hospital room wearing a backward hospital gown and blood-spattered shorts. Gauze was taped to his strawberry blonde curls. His waiting teammates hugged him one by one.

It was 11:38 a.m., four hours after the shooting.

His lucky shirt was in a plastic hospital bag. He had used it to stanch the blood.

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Rome Shubert, 16, was shot on the back of the neck during the shooting that took place at his school Santa Fe High School, Friday, May 18, 2018, in Santa Fe. The injury had an entry wound and an exit wound. (Marie D. De Jesús | Houston Chronicle)

Barnes, the injured police officer, had lost a lot of blood. The 49-year-old’s heart stopped once in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The paramedics brought him back.

They arrived at the hospital and rushed him into surgery. His heart stopped again on the operating table.

The doctors brought him back. After surgery, he remained in intensive care in critical condition.

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Leia Olinde and her fiance had been waiting in the HEB parking lot across the street from the gym where the families of the missing students, including Staniches, had gathered.

Olinde was hoping to find out that her aunt, Cynthia Tisdale, a substitute teacher, was OK. Tisdale’s husband of nearly 40 years couldn’t reach her on her cellphone. They were afraid she might have been subbing at the high school that day.

So Olinde and her fiance, Eric Sanders, sat in the shade of their Chevy Tahoe with the couple’s 4-year-old son, Braeden, waiting for word. With long eyelashes and tiny eyeglasses, Braeden charmed strangers in the parking lot.

“Hold me,” he said to newcomers, his arms outstretched.

Olinde, flushed from the heat, charged her phone in the Tahoe. It wouldn’t stop ringing.

Around 6:30 p.m., families who had congregated inside the gym for hours started filing out in small groups, escorted by police and volunteers to their cars. Some sobbed. Others screamed. The group inside the gym kept getting smaller and smaller, as they learned the missing were dead.

Let’s go back in, Olinde said to Sanders. They disappeared inside the gym.

Minutes later, they came back, escorted like the others. They walked around the other side of the Tahoe, where their son couldn’t see them.

Susan Carroll joined the Chronicle in 2006 and works as an investigative/projects reporter. Along with colleagues Matt Dempsey and Mark Collette, her 2016 work on the danger posed by chemical plants in southeast Texas won awards from the National Press Foundation and Investigative Reporters and Editors. Carroll previously covered the U.S.-Mexico border for the Arizona Republic and the Tucson Citizen. She can be reached by email at Susan.Carroll@chron.com or on Twitter: @_SusanCarroll

David Hunn came to the Chronicle in June 2016 as an enterprise reporter covering energy. He has since written on bankruptcies and debt loads after the 2014 oil price crash and the boom in the Permian Basin that followed. He previously worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a city hall shooting. He can be reached by email at David.Hunn@chron.com or on Twitter: @davidhunn

Emily Foxhall is the Texas Storyteller for the Chronicle. She has written about mental health, crime and the Fort Bend County's ongoing evolution from rural to urban. She joined the Chronicle in 2015 after two years in Orange County, Calif., reporting for the Los Angeles Times and its community papers. Her work also has appeared in the New York Times, the Texas Tribune and the New York Observer. She is a Yale graduate and a Houston native. Email her at emily.foxhall@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @emfoxhall .

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